Car Tech Video: Ferrari 599 Hybrid concept

Car Tech Video: Ferrari 599 Hybrid concept

2:33 /
March 3, 2010

It's the end of the world as we know it, especially when Ferrari rolls out its own hybrid concept at the 2010 Geneva auto show.

[ Music ] ^M00:00:06 [ Background music ] >> Let's cut up some symbols the world's coming to an end, melting polar ice caps. US deficit, Twitter and Ferrari building a hybrid. It's over. This is actually a 599 but it's been refitted with a hybrid system which is prototyped technically but not that far out there. It's a pure hybrid, it's one that could really get in there and run the car strongly or let the gas engine do it all by itself. They say at least a 35% cut in emissions. Other numbers are being cagy about in terms of its final performance but you know when you add electric you get more torque and sports cars reward that. Let's check out the layout of how they do this. Now up front you've got the standard layout of your V12 engine but then coupled onto that here are lithium ion battery packs, 2 of them sitting across side saddle there. They do some good things says Ferrari, they lower the center of gravity because thems heavy and they don't screw with the front to rear weight balance or so they claim. Power from those moves onto the back. You see the hybrid system is clamped onto the tail end of the existing 7 speed dual clutch transmission. It basically powers one half of that thing when needed, one of the output shafts. It can get out of the way when it's not needed to reduce any parasitic friction. Oh by the way you may have seen that kinetic energy recovery system monitor here on the stand. On the formula one side that refers to a fly wheel generating juice that goes into a capacitor, that's pretty exotic stuff and that's not what they're doing in this production vision. If even this though is too extreme for you let me show you a milder way for Ferrari to get not quite this green. Here's the California, it's been on the market for awhile, but for the first time they're gonna have start, stop system in this car, that's a first for the entire high performance super sports scar industry. It'll save about 6% of fuel consumption and improve those emission numbers about 6% as well. Not earth shaking stuff but it's a step in the right direction and let's face it that kind of green stuff works for this crowd, very progressive thinking and all of that. They say it'll restart the motor in a quarter of a second or less once you lift off the break that's time to start rolling from a stop again, that's very quick and about all you'll miss is the ability to rev your engine like an idiot when you were at a stoplight and I'm pretty sure there'll be a defeat if you really want to do that. The downside is the start stop coming out on these Ferraris will not be available in the US market till further notice.